EMC Launches New Open Source Projects; Announces New Community to Buttress Hyper-scale Data Center Management

FREMONT, CA: The open source arena witnesses a series of new releases that triggers innovation and expansion, beginning with the launch of EMC Corporation’s new open-source project termed RackHD that provides a centralized API for hardware management and orchestration across the hyper-scale data center environment. EMC has also released updated version of its open source storage orchestration engine, REX-Ray. In addition to these releases, the CoprHD Community has announced CoprHD 2.4 together with new collaborations with Intel and Oregon State University.

Created for enabling hardware management and orchestration in complex, multi-platform-based data center infrastructure, RackHD provides cohesive APIs to enabled automated infrastructure. In Converged Infrastructure Platform architecture, the software provides hardware management and orchestration and serves as an abstraction layer between other M&O layers and the underlying physical hardware. By using the RackHD API as a component in a larger orchestration system, developers can create a user interface for managing hardware services. It is designed to help organizations accelerate deployment of modern applications that rely on large numbers of commodity servers and heterogeneous infrastructure.

Currently, the rack technology supports variety of Intel processor-based datacenter servers and discovery and monitoring for switches. To motivate contributors in extending device support and making new developments for the Software-defined data centers, a RackHD project community has been established through EMC {code} - the Community Onramp for Developer Enablement.
Furthermore, to make persistent storage accessible during container runtime that are provided by Docker, Mesos, and others, EMC releases an open source project driven by EMC {code}. The new offering REX-Ray has been designed to enable advanced storage functionality across the platforms around storage, virtualization and cloud. The new0.3 release expands storage platform support for GCE (Google Compute Engine) as well as EMC Isilon and EMC VMAX storage systems.

As the first official release of CoprHD, the version 2.4 incorporates new features, projects, and community contributors. CoprHD’s open source storage automation software centralizes and transforms multi-vendor storage into a simple and extensible platform. It expands the scope of CoprHD to include EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), as well as a new REST API for EMC XtremIO 4.0 software.

As new contributors, Intel and Oregon State University join the CoprHD Community to contribute in providing core functionalities, API plugins and integrations, event logistics and support, marketing and PR, and web site design. In order to integrate Keystone with CoprHD and allow the use of the Cinder API and/or the CoprHD API for blocking storage services for OpenStack, EMC is supporting a set of new projects.

A SouthBound Software Development Kit (SDK) has also been designed to allow storage vendors and other third parties to easily add support for other storage systems to CoprHD. In addition to this, even the students of Oregon State University are developing the first plug-in using the SouthBound SDK for a new EMC ScaleIO driver.

All the three new projects are available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 and are hosted on GitHub.

"It's an exciting time for EMC in this new development model where we have EMC employees developing code directly that can help solve big industry challenges while advancing new technologies in a way that everyone can participate in, contribute, criticize and collaborate. RackHD, CoprHD and REX-Ray are technologies that address significant challenges in the Software-Defined data center. We hope that by making these technologies open and accessible that our collective efforts with the development community will benefit a broad range of organizations and applications," says John Roese, Senior Vice President and CTO, EMC Corporation.